Scarcity
All means are scarce, that is, limited with respect to the ends they could possibly serve. Scarcity is the condition that makes economizing necessary, and with it choice, value and economics itself.
Means and general conditions of welfare
If something is available in unlimited abundance it need not be the object of any action. Air in most situations is in unlimited abundance; it is therefore not a means and is not employed as a means to the fulfilment of ends. It need not be allocated, as time is, to the satisfaction of the more important ends, since it is sufficiently abundant for all human requirements. Air, though indispensable, is thus not a means but a general condition of human action and human welfare.
Scarce means must be allocated by the actor to serve certain ends and to leave other ends unsatisfied. This act of choice may be called economizing the means to serve the most desired ends.[1]
The distinction is not a quibble. It marks the boundary of the subject: economics has nothing to say about air as such, and a great deal to say about clean air in a particular place at a particular time, because the latter is scarce and must be economized while the former need not be.
Scarcity is not shortage
Scarcity in the economic sense is a permanent feature of the world and is not the same as a shortage. A shortage is a specific and temporary condition in which the quantity demanded exceeds the quantity supplied at the prevailing price, and in a free market it is resolved by price adjusting. Scarcity is not resolved by anything, and would persist in the wealthiest imaginable society, because ends are unlimited while the means of attaining them are not. Sustained shortages are therefore evidence of prices prevented from adjusting rather than of scarcity having worsened.
Scarcity and property
Because means are scarce, two people can want to put the same means to incompatible uses, and this possibility of conflict is what property rights exist to resolve. On the Austrian account property is not a convention imposed on an otherwise harmonious world; it is the institution by which a world of scarce means is made available for peaceful use, by assigning to each scarce thing an owner entitled to determine its employment. Where a good is genuinely non-scarce, no property question arises, which is the starting point of the Austrian argument that ideas are not scarce in the relevant sense and so raise different questions from physical goods.[2]
See also
References
- ↑ Murray N. Rothbard. 2. First Implications of the Concept, Man, Economy, and State.
- ↑ See Intellectual property and Against Intellectual Property for the development of this argument.
Links
- Scarcity on Wikipedia